The Lost TARDIS
by Type 22 TARDIS
Summary: Doctor Who AU-Another TARDIS survives the destruction of Gallifrey. With its crew dead and its systems crippled, it finds itself an operator who can help it unravel its convoluted and strange past, and unlock the terrible secret of where it came from...
1. Prologue

Disclaimer: Doctor Who doesn't belong to me, nor do any of the concepts, technologies, species or characters from the series.

**The Lost TARDIS**

**By Type 22 TARDIS**

**Epilogue:**

Broken time. Sailing along currents and streams of alternating red and blue fire, ascending and descending into different dimensions, different shades of the same existence, dodging and darting as fast as I could. I was fast, faster than the enemy ships, but not as fast as my fellows. We were all so fast, the enemy couldn't catch us. Not easily. But they numbered in the low billions, while we measured in the tens of thousands. The enemy ships were sometimes were close-by, sometimes far-away, sometimes both at the same time. I could understand this. But when the linear pilots and technicians asked me to explain, I could not.

Sometimes I could see the future. And the past. Faraway events, events that would not happen, events that could, events that must. I could see it all, flowing through me all at once, and not at all. I could understand this, but when I tried to put it into words, even in my own mind, I could not. Words hurt. A lot.

When I looked at this battle, however, even I couldn't see the future. Or the past. All I could see was the present. I should have understood the awful implications of this. At the time, it was clear why I couldn't see the past; the two greatest civilizations in the universe, both capable of time travel, both engaged in the largest conflict that had ever been, or would ever be. Or would it? I couldn't see anymore, and I didn't like it. I couldn't see properly, as though someone had filled my eyes with mud.

I tried to raise my hands to my face, to wipe my eyes, but I couldn't move them. I couldn't even feel my hands. I tried to look down, and look at myself, but as my mind sharpened and I began to realize that something was wrong, there was a momentary stab of pain, and I felt my mind slip back into its unthinking, almost meditative state.

As for not being able to see the future, that seemed just as obvious at the time. I assumed that with so many complex space-time events interacting across the different dimensions and transitioning through the Time Vortex, folding back across their own timelines, that my computer systems were overloaded with data, unable to make sense out of the swirling, ever-changing chaos.

As I began to wonder about the term _computer_ and what this had to do with me, I suddenly changed course. I felt a surge of power from deep inside me, as my operators channelled all of my meagre stocks of energy into my engines. _Engines._ What a strange thing to think. I wondered about that. I began to feel a nagging uncertainty. Engines? Computers? I couldn't feel my legs, or anything for that matter. How could I be moving? Another stab of mind-numbing pain, and I felt a sweeping bliss descend over me again, quickly followed by my unthinking acceptance of my situation.

I was moving, faster and faster, hurtling towards something ahead of us. The silhouettes of blocky vessels, clumsily and jerkily bobbing along the time currents, came into view. They surrounded one of my fellow TARDISes, who was dodging and darting here and there, lashing out with weapons that caused existence itself to warp in their wake. Several enemy vessels blossomed with internal blue fire that consumed them from the inside, but she was also under fire, and hundreds more of the strange, blocky vessels were moving into view. _Fellow_ TARDISes? Did that mean that I… Pain. Blinding pain. And then my mind was silent again, unquestioning.

I felt my throat move, and I distinctly felt my vocal chords vibrating as I yelled through the realm of flames and chaos. Or did I? I didn't know what I said, it was my operators after all that made me speak, but my friend answered. My consciousness awakened somewhat, though not enough to inspire the pacifying agony. It was enough, though, that I understood the idea behind the words she used. _'The remaining allied forces are falling back to regroup. Dalek ships are preventing us from using shortcut realms. Travelling through normal space would be risky.' _There was a momentary pause, and then _'There is no alternative. Travel to the cramped-simple-linear realm. We will follow.'_

My friend fell through the floor of the universe, and I followed, slower than she was. I was younger, much younger than she was, but I was less advanced. The blocky ships followed. I felt the strain as I forcibly moved my manifestation to a lower, less complex plane of existence. A deep, grinding, almost metallic wheeze permeated my being, rumbling through me as I travelled into the domain of my operators.

The stars leapt into being around me, and I was off, my heart grinding out a steady rhythm as I soared away from the blocky ships. They appeared behind and around us, fading into existence. A particularly large vessel faded into view in front of me, studded with weapons and sensory apparatus. I dodged around it, and I felt some of my energy go from moving to protecting myself.

I was just in time; bolts of light streaked from the rear weapons platforms of the enemy's ship, and spattered harmlessly against my shields. My friend retaliated with twin lances of light. Seeing them made me feel strange and weak, and I thought that perhaps they were more than the simple plasma lances they appeared to be. The effect they had on the enemy was spectacular and terrifying; they cut clean through the bulky warship, boiling through fifty meters of polycarbide in an instant.

They didn't stop there; the beams abruptly vanished after slicing through the enemy's infernal machine, and flickered back into existence, in a different point in space, coming in at a different angle, boiling another hole into the vessel. This happened over one-hundred times, almost instantly; the vessel drifted away, with hundreds of wide red-rimmed holes riddling its structure, trailing atmosphere, bodies and plasma from its cracked reactor core.

In the momentary lull that followed, I was directed to sprint after the vicious female, who was moving far faster than I, towards a massive red and orange planet that loomed in the distance. I had a vague idea the planet was called Gallifrey. We had been ordered to retreat, consolidate our forces for another push. I could see that the planet was ringed with thousands of cloaked minefields, almost one-hundred thousand automated weapons platforms, and it was patrolled by dozens of TARDISes, with tens of thousands more TARDISes retreating behind the protective emplacements. The blocky ships followed us as we fled, firing dense salvoes of plasma, hyperaccelerated metal slugs, antimatter sachets and strange, mysterious dark energy pulses. I wove and dodged, avoiding the fire, though barely staying ahead of the enemy.

I spoke again, yelling indistinctly, and I realized it wasn't my throat; I felt strips of metal in my shell become excited, resonating more or less, modulating the vibrations they emitted so that they formed coherent patterns. I cast this vibration ahead of me like a spear, and almost immediately there was a response, though I didn't think it was a reply to what I had said; it wasn't from the female TARDIS ahead of me.

'_I'm sorry.' _The message was simple, broadcast on every frequency. Unencrypted and spoken in a universal tongue; the enemy would detect it, as well as the Timelords. I could tell where in space it had originated; I didn't know if I initiated the action, or my operators, but I focused a visual scanner on the source of the signal, and I saw something which was, quite obviously, a TARDIS.

It was a simple blue box, positioned just beyond the furthest edge of this solar system, far behind the line of hostile ships, more tall than broad, and my archives indicated that it was colloquially known as a police box, widely used on a planet called Earth early on in the Humanian Era. Additional information scrolled across my vision; dates, models, times, uses and other historical information. The TARDIS was obviously a Timelord TARDIS, and a popup appeared on my vision; this was the preferred manifestation of the TARDIS used by a renegade Timelord known as the Doctor.

I processed this quickly, momentarily forgetting about the hostile ships looming behind me, and then I saw an unknown energy discharge appear in the centre of this system's sun, plainly generated by something on-board the Doctor's TARDIS. A moment later, I detected something that caused fear to filter through my thoughtless motion and movement; nothing. As I examined the timelines around me, the shifting streams of causality and fate, always churning and shifting, I realised that they were growing silent. It was as though there was an expanding sphere of absolute nothingness exploding from the star at the centre of this star system.

It took several seconds for the Timelords to begin to react; their TARDISes streaked away from Gallifrey, but they were far too late, and far too slow; the second star had already been swallowed; I could still see it with visual scanners as the light moved much more slowly than the shockwave, though sensors registered that it had ceased to exist. I felt my engines shift, and suddenly I was slowing, then streaking back as fast as I could, back the way I had come.

My emergency reserves were triggered and dumped into my propulsion systems, all of my reactors and generators pushed far above recommended safety limits. The female TARDIS, now behind me, was catching up. The enemy ships fired a few shots at me, which I easily dodged, but I wasn't armed. The female TARDIS behind me was. She was, therefore, a priority target; she was suddenly smothered with thousands of plasma bolts, railgun rounds and antimatter explosives, and intense tachyon beams stabbed at her shields and shell. The enemy vessels hadn't realised what was happening yet, though they would in a few seconds.

My operators tried to activate my faster-than-light drives, but they wouldn't engage. They tried again. Same response; nothing. A quick scan revealed that an intense energy field was being emitted by the Doctor's TARDIS, preventing FTL travel in this solar system. He was preventing anyone from escaping the nothing-explosion; dozens of transmissions were being directed at him now, then hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions…

'_EXTER-MIN-ATE! EXTER-MIN-ATE!' _was by far the most common, along with curses, oaths and hurried orders from Gallifrey and the Timelord's TARDISes, that all went unanswered. Suddenly, the wave of silence hit Gallifrey, and I heard screams and yells, cut off mid-way, ring through space. For four or five seconds, Gallifrey held; the planet's massive shield generators and trillions upon trillions of ultra-complex space-time events shielded it, but then it began to unravel; there was a sort of red aurora effect around the planet, the surface shimmered and contorted, and then it vanished, as did the vessels and damaged TARDISes in orbit.

Not only did they cease to exist in space, but also in time; their timelines had been deleted, erasing them from existence. Or maybe not? I could still detect their past, but it felt strange, crystallized; as though it had been permanently frozen, preventing any escape. As I considered this, it became obvious why I couldn't see the future of the battle, and events in this star system; there weren't any.

The enemy was beginning to scatter now, their ships turning, firing engines and moving as quickly as they could, away from the silence that the Doctor had unleashed. The female TARDIS behind me was in trouble; she was drifting towards me, still under fire from the retreating enemy vessels, surrounded by an intense, massive cloud of orange plasma from all the weapons striking her; her shields flickered, and then went out. The hated enemy wasted no time; dozens of rounds moving at relativistic speeds battered on her outer shell, and the tachyon beams gouged chunks of her block-matter shell away.

Her doors were quickly breached, and all but one ship ceased fire; it launched half-a-dozen anti-TARDIS torpedoes, which zoomed neatly through the tiny breach in the miniscule ship, vanishing from view. There was a moment's silence, and then the TARDIS vanished in a massive explosion of multi-coloured flames, sending a massive ripple effect through space as the micro-universe the TARDIS existed in was dumped into the real universe. Hundreds of thousands of tons of TARDIS infrastructure was mapped onto the universe, floating in space, torn and glowing red-hot, ruined beyond repair.

I felt a pang of sorrow for the sudden, unnecessary death of my fellow TARDIS, but strangely only a sort of deep, empty contempt for the enemy vessels. In a bleak, detached way, I watched as the Timelord's vessels were caught, one-by-one, in the wave of non-existence, and I watched them writhe and flail, their engines firing desperately, as the space-time they needed to exist and move snapped out from under them; after a split second, their shells were compromised and their internal structures were ravaged with time-fire.

The wreckage of the female TARDIS was swallowed next, disintegrating almost immediately upon being hit, closely followed by the slowest of the enemy vessels; they didn't offer any resistance to the nothingness, and vanished immediately. The Doctor's TARDIS was struck by the trailing edge of the wave, just as it began to dissipate. I didn't see exactly what happened, but I saw his TARDIS on fire, fragmenting and vanishing before it disappeared into silence. A few seconds later, I was nearing the edge of the solar system; my sensors detected that the space ahead wasn't permeated with the energy field that prevented FTL travel; I put on a huge spurt of speed; my engines strained at levels they'd never been at before, every single emergency reserve of power were discharging at maximum speed, my auxiliary fuel cells were haemorrhaging into my artron energy converters.

The wave of non-being was snuffing the enemy ships behind me out of existence; I watched a fifteen kilometre-long super-dreadnought caught; its rear flared and disintegrated, and then the rest of it was swallowed, shimmering as it vanished. Too soon, the time-fire wave was lapping at my rear.

Suddenly, it was in direct contact with my shell, and I felt space-time disintegrating around me. My shell seemed to be fading, and an eerie numbness was suffusing my systems. In a last, desperate move, I converted every single room and corridor, save my central core, into pure energy, and dumped it all into my reactors. Pain filled me, but I fought the calm acceptance that it offered, and struggled to stay focussed.

My structure was different from other TARDISes; they were manufactured from pure mathematics, block-transfer equations that simulated matter. I _was_ real matter, and as such my structure was rigid and solid, and my engines couldn't process the stuff that I was feeding them properly. Suddenly, it was over; I dumped all of my excess energy into my FTL drive, and leapt forwards, covering a-thousand lightyears in a hundredth of a second.

I was sent soaring through space and time by the wave and my momentum, bouncing forwards and backwards in time, jumping from point to point in space. I hadn't properly synchronised with the space-time continuum, and as such the normal laws of physics didn't apply to me. I had so much momentum that I knew I wouldn't be stopping any time soon.

It felt like all of the strength had left me; something important had been lost when I had been hit by the wave, but I couldn't remember what. My engines wouldn't respond, and time-travel seemed an impossible task. Evidently my core had been damaged. I decided that the first action I would need to take would be take stock of my situation; I was surprised, but didn't contemplate it too much, when I realised that my intangible shackles had been released; I was free to move and make decisions.

My self-diagnostics quickly revealed that I was near a complete systems failure; I could still travel in time and space, but only at a very slow pace, and I couldn't generate enough power to stop myself yet. My operators had been killed when I had been hit by the wave; my internal structure had been bathed in non-being, and they, far less complex space-time events than I was, were deleted relatively quickly.

As I travelled, I thought, and I remembered. Or rather, peered into my past and future. My vision was faint and wispy now; I could barely see the destruction of Gallifrey. This sensation of vagueness was intensifying; something inside me was sliding shut, re-sealing, and it was harder and harder to stay conscious and in the here-and-now. With a gargantuan effort that weakened me to my core, I pushed back the mist that was now permeating me. I tried to remember what happened before Gallifrey, before the battle. Instead of memories of the past, I received weird flashes, visions of things past and future.

It didn't happen all at once; I saw bits of it, in flashes, sensations, interspersed with moments of strange clarity. I saw an asteroid, hollowed out, filled with dozens of different species, trading, talking, exchanging, eating, drinking. Living. So many timelines crossing, and… My own timeline folded into there, somehow. Another timeline, piggy-backed on mine, very simple compared to that of my operators, but already too complex to be that of a linear being. My vision flickered, and I saw a young man walking down a street, examining tapestries and rugs, pottery and metalwork, strange crystal sculptures and a metallic-green and blue bird that sung in weird, hypnotic notes.

Then I saw myself, crewed by strange, hateful metal beings. Tiny lumps of genetically-engineered loathing and anger given form, moving around in harsh, unimaginative suits of metal, every thought and action designed to destroy. They moved with mechanical precision, but somehow a red aura of impotent rage shone off them as they tended me. _Built _me. I felt sick, contaminated, as they carefully laid out circuitry and installed systems, wrote hateful programs on my computers.

Then everything changed again; I was on Gallifrey, and my operators were talking. The enemy, the _Daleks, _they called them, had moved from a cold war of attrition to open warfare against the Timelords. They were deploying hundreds of millions of vessels against the Timelords, with tens of billions of ships, mass-manufactured on the sprawling, now-destroyed factory planets scattered throughout the universe, soaring in, providing reinforcements. Tens of thousands of slave races were forced to build new ships and weapons for them, and to fight on the front lines, providing these _Daleks _with tens of trillions of disposable soldiers and pilots.

The final battle had raged and raged, with _tens of __billions_ of Dalek warships and invasion vessels destroyed, and thousands of TARDISes destroyed, with hundreds limping back to Gallifrey for repairs.

The Gallifreyan automated weapons and mines had destroyed too many ships to count, and as the Daleks were using time-travel to temporally duplicate fleets of ships, strange creatures emerged from the time vortex and attacked them, causing isolated pockets of blazing action that the Timelords exploited wherever possible. Time was churned and sloshed by so much time-travel that even the TARDISes couldn't tell what had happened and what was going to happen, and time travel was all but impossible. It _was_ impossible in the Gallifrey star system, anyway.

Then I was on another planet; a vast, bright purple desert with three slightly dim suns overhead, combining to make a rather dazzling spectacle. I saw a black monolith, with footprints leading away from it. Then I was back in the here-and-now, more confused than I was before. All these images did was confuse me further; at one point I had been in Dalek hands, and they had worked on me. Had they built me? Sabotaged me? Or simply captured me? Yes, that was it, I was captured, and then reclaimed by my Timelord operators.

Hours passed, and then days, and with a few subtle nudges with my engines, I managed to gradually bring myself to a halt, but I was so desperately tired, and so badly damaged. My own computer systems had been steadily failing, and my self-repair systems had been destroyed. After the second day, I could feel my own mind beginning to become feeble and uncertain, and I began to become confused, forgetting how to phrase system access commands and muddling tables of statistics that gave information on my system's abilities.

I knew that without another sentient being to link with and use as an anchor and guide, I would fade away into nothing far before my body failed. I needed to survive, and niggling at the back of my mind was the strong desire to learn where I came from. For that, I would need an operator. I examined the remaining parts of the on-board data archives, and used them, combined with my visual scanners, to determine my position. I then computed a course to the closest planet known to have intelligent life. I merely hoped that I would land in a time-zone where said intelligent life still existed.

It took me minutes to make orbit around Earth, which once would have taken so little time so as to appear instantaneous to my operators. I then verified that intelligent life did indeed exist in this era. I considered my next course of action very carefully; if I were to attempt to bond with a savage Human, he or she would simply use me as a tool. I would need to find a Human who was morally enlightened, someone who would not abuse me, but care for me. Using what was left of my backup telepathic circuits, I carefully scanned the planet.

As I scanned, I continued to peer into the past, focusing on the Daleks, and what they had to do with me, trying to figure out that part of the mystery. I saw flickering, shadowy visions of Daleks planting plagues and assassinating leaders, murdering people and aliens who got too close to discovering them. I saw them directing the construction of warships so large that they generated their own gravitational wells, and arming trillions of aliens with plasma rifles, forcing them onto the front lines under pain of death. None of this was surprising; the Daleks were an extremely destructive race, after all.

I became more and more vague as the days passed; I began to have trouble remembering who I was, and what I was doing. I still resumed my search for a bond-mate; I made sure the individual was intelligent, creative, something of a loner, and I felt my search narrowing down to a few tens of thousands of individuals.

I waited for five days before making my decision. I could not say what drew me to him. We were both damaged, both lost, both outcasts, misfits and both were filled with contradictions, unsure of ourselves. He wasn't quite the most intelligent, or the most creative. He wasn't the most outgoing or adventuresome. I really didn't know what drew me to him.

With a tortured groaning, wheezing sound, I materialized gently around him. The impact of materializing around him like that jarred him; he fell unconscious. I watched him, and held him as gently as I could on the hard metal deck. I reached deep into his mind, and posed the question to his subconscious; _'Will you be my Timelord? Live for thousands of years, awash upon the seas of time with me? Will you help me find answers?' _I received an affirmative, and I began the long, complicated and irreversible process of tying our minds and souls together.

As I began I felt my mind sharpen, and I felt a surge of energy deep inside me. I would need to test him, to see if his mind had the strength and integrity I required. A simple test first, I thought. I plotted the course, and began pre-flight preparations as he stirred, blinking. He rose, uncertainly, and I wondered if I'd just made a terrible mistake. _'No going back now.' _I thought, and with that, we were off…


	2. The Hitchhiker

Disclaimer: Doctor Who doesn't belong to me, nor do any of the concepts, technologies, species or characters from the series.

**The Lost TARDIS  
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**By Type 22 TARDIS**

**The Hitchhiker:  
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The first thing Derrick was aware of was pain. Pain mixed with nausea. Not sharp pain, that indicated an immediate threat. A dull ache behind him eyes, and a horrible feeling of motion sickness permeated him. Still dazed and groggy, he blinked, and rose to a sitting position, looking around. It only took him a few moments to realise that something wasn't right; his eyes snapped open and he got to his feet as quickly as possible, which wasn't that fast given that his muscles and joints ached and screamed in protest.

Grimacing, he looked around, and, seeing no immediate threat, started to examine his environment more carefully. He was in a large octagonal room, about twenty or thirty meters across, with a ceiling that was about seven meters tall in the centre of the room, and about four meters tall at the edges. Built into four of the walls were sliding doors, the closest of which was much smaller than the others, recessed in a three-meter long mini-corridor. The other three doors were much larger, four meters wide and three and-a-half meters tall, made out of thick steel or some other heavy, strong metal.

The room was dim and filled with weirdly-shaped shadows, with the only light emanating from a construct in the centre of the room. It was formed by a hexagonal bank of what was presumably control consoles of some kind; smashed sheets of crystal, bundles of frayed, torn wires and dented metal plates studded with buttons lined the hexagonal structure. In the centre of this construct was a nest of frayed and torn wires and cabling, with a foot-and-a-half thick glass tube projecting from the tangle of half-wrecked machinery into a semi-spherical machine attached in the dead-centre of the ceiling. Inside the tube, on the extreme upper and lower sections was a flanged glass assemblage.

The ceiling and walls were lined with thick metal braces, each looking like it could support a small bridge; they were pitted and burned, trailing cables that dangled, severed, throughout the room, like vines in a jungle. The walls on the sides of the room that did not house doors were lined with more control consoles, similarly gutted, belching fibre-optic cabling and what looked like chunky data cables. The walls and ceiling were solid, heavy metal, but the floor was made of a metal mesh, which allowed Derrick to glimpse the hulking shapes of machinery, piping and cabling underneath him, though it was too dark to see any level of detail.

Derrick hesitated, and was internally debating whether or not to yell when the dim aquamarine light that filled the room brightened, and he felt a whirring start up all around him. A few seconds passed, and then he felt a twinge at the back of his mind; it passed before he could give it much thought. There was a faint, distant metallic groaning sound, and the glass tube at the centre of the room glowed momentarily with cyan light. The noise repeated after a moment, much louder, and the two glass assemblages inside the tubing both moved closer together. The floor shuddered worryingly, and Derrick staggered towards the central console, losing his balance at the sudden and unexpected shift in gravity.

The floor shuddered and the gravity shifted erratically this way and that, though Derrick was able to stay balanced by holding on tight to a sort of dented steel tube that protruded from the shattered and charred console. The tube at the centre of the console pulsed with aqua light with each drawn out mechanical groan, and the glass assemblages moved, first closer, then further away, also in time with the noise. It lasted about fifteen seconds, and then suddenly the noise increased even more, and the shuddering and shifting gravity turned into a strange, momentary feel of weightlessness, followed by a loud _thump_ and the rather sharp return of normal gravity.

The aquamarine light returned to its previous levels, making the room seem even more dark and shadowy, and the floor stopped pitching, rolling and vibrating. The machinery inside the large glass tube ceased its motion, and everything was still. Derrick hesitated, slowly releasing his grip on the destroyed machinery, wondering what on Earth just happened. It didn't even cross his mind that this was a dream; it was too real, too exotic and too unexpected. Derrick looked around, wondering if anything else was going to happen, and then cautiously made his way towards the smallest door; his laptop bag, that he had been carrying, lay still and prone on the metal mesh that made up the floor.

Derrick hesitated, looking around. Everything was fairly quiet and still; he could hear the sound of small, discreet fans running in the background, cooling machinery, an almost imperceptible whirr from the central console, and the occasional creak of cooling metal. He slowly walked towards the laptop bag, his eyes and ears scanning for anything that might indicate people nearby, and then he hesitated again as he stood in front of the black, synthetic fibre bag. He picked it up, and then hesitated. _Laptop bag..._ He thought. _But I was..._

The TARDIS surveyed Derrick quietly through its internal sensors. It felt drained, and tired. It was shocked at the effort of bringing the Human here. It double-checked its systems, and was unpleasantly surprised to find that there was another string of errors and fried sub-systems in its main temporal drive; that was the cause of the alarming power drain. _'I need a Timelord to begin repairs on me, and soon.'_ It thought.

Meanwhile, Derrick had picked up his bag, and had retrieved his lanyard, laden with keys, and more to the point, a bright LED torch. He couldn't find anything inside the room that warranted staying; he checked the four doors, and found the three larger ones locked or inoperative; the smaller door swished neatly open as he approached, and he blinked as indirect, though still harsh, sunlight began to fill the room.

Derrick moved towards the open door, and moved out into dry heat and the brightest sunlight he had ever experienced; it was whiter than he remembered, more youthful somehow. He had to cover his eyes with his hands to peek at the ground as he went. His eyes adjusted after a few moments, and he lowered his hands, still squinting, his eyes watering in that strangely bright and hot sun.

He had walked out onto hard-packed, dry earth, studded with small rocks. He looked around, staring into the distance, slowly turning counter-clockwise. Then he froze when he saw what was behind him. He didn't know what he was expecting, but he certainly wasn't expecting a perfect black monolith, imposing and grand. He stepped back, and blinked, his eyes adjusting to a very alien sight.

It wasn't just the unexpected monolith that caught him, it was the fact that the monolith was _so_ perfect; not a glint, chip or… Or a doorway to walk through. He walked around the whole thing; it was roughly half a foot thick, just under two meters wide, and he couldn't see a single hole or indentation on the entire thing. It even seemed to absorb all of the sunlight perfectly; it didn't glint or reflect any light whatsoever.

Walking back to what was presumably the "front" of the monolith, Derrick reached out, wondering how he had walked through a solid, undamaged surface; it definitely wasn't a curtain or similar optical illusion. He touched the seemingly solid, unnaturally perfect surface, and his fingers passed through it as though it were merely air.

Instinctually, he stepped forwards, needing to see the whole thing again for himself, to confirm it hadn't been some sort of joke or optical illusion. He walked into the black surface, and as his eyes hit it, everything went completely black. He hesitated, and took a few tentative steps forward. _'It wasn't like this before.' _He thought, and at the back of his mind a tiny voice whispered that it was a security measure; anyone entering from outside without a key would walk in complete blackness until they entered the main control room.

After he had walked about three meters, Derrick suddenly passed through the black, weightless substance, whatever it was, and was back inside the main control room. He turned around, and saw that the door was still open, sunlight streaming in, hot, dry air rushing in to replace the cold, metallic air inside the room.

Derrick walked back outside, moving backwards, staring into the room with the glowing control console, curious as to when the darkness rose. As soon as he passed into the outside world, there was a sort of shadowy ripple across his vision and a perfect black barrier appeared suddenly in front of him. 'Very clever.' Derrick muttered under his breath.

The TARDIS observed Derrick approvingly. It could feel the connection, now tenuous and very superficial, deepening as Derrick learned and thought. It could now vaguely sense what he was thinking; his thoughts moved in and out of focus. _'However, even at this rate he will not learn sufficiently quickly to effect repairs. We need to move more quickly. Perhaps… We should push the bonding process forwards.'_

Derrick blinked, and rubbed his forehead. He'd just had a sudden wave of intense nausea. He staggered, his sense of balance shifting as his stomach seemed to swirl in sickening patterns. _'Failing. Neural damage imminent. Discontinue. Too late. Must see this through. Hold on, Derrick. I will guide us through this.' _Derrick staggered, and then threw up noisily on the ground just in front of the black monolith. He flailed and fell to the ground as he felt hot needles burn into his brain and down his spine. Suddenly, images and sounds started to rush around him:

_He saw himself, proffering a hand to an iridescent blue and green bird in a cage; the bird lowered its head, and he gently stroked its neck and back. The shopkeeper waddled over to him; it was a short, rotund creature with three legs and spindly arms, with a bulging cranium and three pairs of sharp, yellow eyes. It chittered and chattered to him, and Derrick felt meaning filter through him. 'I'm just browsing.' He replied, and then hesitated. He turned, and Derrick felt shock as the apparition looked him straight in the eye, and winked._

Derrick stood, and tried to move; he was reduced to crawling. He could barely see anything at all, and his body felt completely numb, with only a swirling cold inside him. The vision disintegrated into swirling fog and then vanished, and Derrick realised that he was lying on his front on the ground, baking hot with a mouthful of sand and grit.

Derrick sat up, gasping with pain as his head pounded. He felt beaten and sore, and his mind seemed oddly tender. His memories were disorganised, and he had trouble forming coherent thought. He slowly stood, looking around, and saw the black monolith, about half a kilometre away from him. Has he really crawled all that way? He gulped drily; he felt hot and parched, and his balance seemed to be off.

He was about to start for it, when he realised something; in the opposite direction from the monolith, about two-hundred meters away was a very bizarre, and plainly alien sight.

His burning, dry eyes slid over the structure, which was implanted firmly in the dirt in a slight dip, which was why he hadn't seen it from the monolith. It was slender, made out of several dozen thin, silver, rib-like projections that curved into a semi-spherical dome. Several more silver ribs wound around the structure, presumably for added strength. Stretched between the ribs on the upper sections of the structure were green, organic-looking membranes.

Derrick swayed, wondering if he was seeing things from lack of water, when he heard a sudden, loud clicking from behind him. He turned, and swore, tried to jump back, and tripped over a rock, falling hard on his rump. A large, ant-like creature was clicking and clacking behind him. It was almost identical to an ant, though it had two nostrils mounted above a shining pair of pincers, almost like a dog's. It was a similar size to an average dog, too. That, and it was off-white in colour.

Derrick blinked, and froze. This was all too much; appearing on a desert planet with three suns, a monolith that contained a hidden room that was bigger on the inside, silver bones growing out of the dirt, strange visions or hallucinations… The insect clicked aggressively at him, snapping at his feet with its pincers. Derrick kicked at it, and it batted his foot away with a surprisingly fast and strong forward leg.

Derrick jumped to his feet, and started to step back, moving towards the silver bone structure, and the insect moved forward again, its limbs moving with stiff, jerky movements, the pincers clicking, seemingly excited. Derrick stepped back again, and the insect pursued him. Derrick paused. The insect had ceased attacking him; it seemed to be _herding_ him towards the bone hive. It obviously wanted him for something.

Something like _dinner._

Panicking, he rushed the insect, dodging past it, and ran as fast as he could towards the black monolith. He didn't know if he'd be safe there, but at least there hadn't been anything actively threatening there before. He panted and puffed in the sweltering heat, sweat pouring from him, making him sticky and irritated in unpleasant places. Behind him, he heard a strange, rhythmical clicking and tapping. He glanced over his shoulder, and blanched; the insect was running faster than he was, its limbs propelling itself efficiently across the dirt. Derrick put on a spurt of speed, which was difficult; he was something of a computer nerd, and running was very foreign to him, let alone sprinting for his life.

The TARDIS watched as Derrick ran from the insect. Why was he running from it? It was clear to the TARDIS, at least, that it only wanted to take him for interrogation, perhaps a mutual information exchange. If only the TARDIS hadn't tried so hard to worm into the Human's head; if it tried to telepathically bond more rapidly, it would undoubtedly cause brain damage that might be difficult to repair.

"_Sentients Proximity Warning-Banshee Protocol on Standby" _The TARDIS suddenly detected an electromagnetic signature approaching rapidly. Judging by the limited and badly damaged sensors, it was a small land-based vehicle, probably powered by a prehistoric cold fusion cell, or perhaps some ancient form of zero-point energy induction.

Derrick could hear the insect catching up to him, but he couldn't go any faster. He was semi-delirious from the heat and dehydration. He could hear the insect clicking along calmly behind him, not slowing or faltering; evidently its adapted biology was serving it well. Suddenly, Derrick's head snapped up.

He could hear it. Hear and see something moving. A _vehicle. _He almost cried with relief as he saw a sort of closed-cabin buggy or light armoured car zooming towards him, a large-barrelled weapon mounted on the back. The insect slowed, stopped, and then skittered away in the opposite direction. The vehicle skidded around Derrick, and then slowed.

There was a loud _crack_ that made his ears ring that coincided a flare of white-blue light; a lance of white fire stabbed out from the weapon, moving so fast it seemed to just appear as a solid line, and speared the insect, sending up a spray of molten glass, causing wind to buffet Derrick's face from the impact. The vehicle doubled back as Derrick stood there, panting, and then skidded to a halt ten metres in front of him.

Derrick didn't know whether or not he should wave, shout, put his hands up or move forwards; he stood, staring as the large weapon was levelled on him, the humanoid operator crouching behind protective metal plating, and two figures swathed in filthy yellowish cloaks, complete with shadowy hoods, leapt from the vehicle. They started towards him, one brandishing a metre-and-a-half long pipe, with a crude handle made from strips of cloth, the other a long piece of metal with several rusty metal spikes sticking out of the end, making a crude, if lethal club.

The figures stopped in front of him; they were humanoid, with no visible flesh. They seemed agitated, though they didn't immediately attack; the one with the pipe moved forwards, and spoke in a strange tongue that seemed to lilt and flow, quite at odds with their appearance. 'I'm sorry. I don't understand.' Derrick said, loudly and clearly.

The TARDIS realised it should have intervened earlier. _'Enabling long-distance telepathic circuits. Warning! Telepathic circuit effective range is at 2.3% of optimum. Activating translation matrix… Warning! Primary translation computer offline. Enabling backup computer… Warning! Backup translation computer is at 14.1% of optimum. Telepathic connection establishing… Done.'_

Derrick grimaced as he felt a stab of pain at the back of his mind, though it passed quickly. Suddenly, he had the strangest feeling he could understand what the people were saying. He listened for a few moments, and then said, 'Hold on, did you ask my name?' Both figures advanced, lowering their weapons slightly. The one with the pipe spoke again, and Derrick realised that he _could_ understand what they were saying, if he didn't think about it too hard.

'My name's Derrick.' He said, and the two figures glanced at one another. They seemed to understand what he'd said. The one on the left spoke again, and his strange, lilting voice shifted and warbled, and meaning filtered through his words. _'Who are you? What are you doing here?' _'I'm Derrick, I'm… I don't know why I'm here, I… Where _is_ here?' Derrick asked.

'_This is the edge of the Salt Plains.' _'I mean, what do you call this _world?_' Derrick asked, and the figures hesitated. _'This is _Ut'aee'Vareeia II._' _Part of what they'd said was in English; it contrasted sharply with their own tongue. _'Are you from another outpost?'_ The one with the club asked, waving the implement. 'I don't know.' There was a warning yell from the figure hunched behind the weapon, and the two figures in front of Derrick yelled in alarm, and rushed back to their vehicle.

Derrick spun around. There were shapes moving towards them; half a dozen giant insects were scuttling towards them, their patterns different from the first one; they blended with the rocks and dried clay perfectly. One of them was bulkier, and had a peculiar, spiny growth on its back. The weapon on the vehicle fired again, and Derrick felt the air and his stomach lurch as the weapon made a terrible _crack_. Another geyser of molten glass and shattered rock spat a metre into the air.

'_Get in!' _Came a cry from the vehicle. Derrick, strangely, hesitated for a moment, but cried out as suddenly, something struck him in the right thigh. He staggered forwards, and felt another something whip by him, and heard pings and pangs from the vehicle in front of him. The insects were firing at them! The larger, spiky insect was firing dense salvoes of steel-hard spines at them.

Derrick ran as fast as he could for the vehicle, and leapt through an open door, which was quickly slammed behind him. He had a confused impression of lying awkwardly across someone's lap, his feet jammed against the door. There was a burning in his right thigh, and yelling. He was bouncing forwards and backwards, and he could feel the futuristic Humvee accelerating rapidly, dodging this way and that.

He pulled himself forwards, and sat upright on what seemed to be a heavily-worn silver-grey sofa that lined the rear wall of the spacious, closed cabin. He looked straight ahead, through the windscreen, wide-eyed, his mind completely cold and blank, and there was a sudden, loud _crack_ that rang through the cabin, and he felt the whole vehicle lurch alarmingly.

There was a flash of white light from outside, and Derrick knew that the weapon had fired again. He dragged himself into an unoccupied seat, and righted himself, wondering what sort of wonders, or horrors, he had been plunged into…


	3. Daleks And Relative Dimension In Space

Disclaimer: Doctor Who doesn't belong to me, nor do any of the concepts, technologies, species or characters from the series.

**The Lost TARDIS  
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**By Type 22 TARDIS**

**Daleks And Relative Dimension In Space:  
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Captain Tosha observed the sensor console, her mind whirring as she tried to determine what the mysterious object was. Her freighter had dropped out of hyperspace in order to recalibrate their navigational systems; they were on a two-year run to an outer colony. They were halfway through their two-year journey, but due to their ship's well-maintained systems and their excellent navigational hardware, they were a whole month ahead of schedule.

Now, she internally debated whether or not to salvage the artefact; through visual sensors, it appeared to be a light grey monolith, just under three meters tall, just over one-and-a-half meters wide and only about twenty centimetres thick. The ship's other sensors gave strange, almost contradictory readings; it appeared to be shielded from most active scans; LIDAR could detect it, though RADAR scans could not. It also did not show up on thermal scans, and the neutrino scanners indicated it had infinite density, though a gravity scan indicated it weighed in at about three-hundred kilograms, indicating very high density, though not absurdly so.

The sensor operator sat hunched over his console, tapping out commands and examining strange, wavy lines that appeared in various coloured boxes on his screens. 'It's strange,' He muttered, and the Captain waited for him to elaborate. She knew her sensor operator was a very good technician, if somewhat abrupt and socially awkward. 'We can see it, and LIDAR pulses bounce off it, so we can detect it, but RADAR, thermal emission scans, superluminal particle bombardment, all of those show that it doesn't exist. Completely undetectable.' He glanced at her. 'If we hadn't stumbled on it, we wouldn't have detected it.'

'Is it safe to bring aboard?' the Captain asked, and the sensor operator, Jake, leaned back, not answering, and stroked his chin. 'Is it safe?' She prompted, and he shrugged. 'Anyone capable of building a substance like this would be a threat. But if this thing was dangerous, I reckon it would've attacked by now.' 'Any idea of what exactly it is?' Another silence, and then, 'Could be a probe. Or a beacon. A marker. Perhaps a black box. Can't say for sure.' 'Should we hail it?' 'Can't hurt to try.

Captain Tosha looked over Jake's shoulder at the banks of monitors and computers that made up his station. Her thoughts drifted momentarily to Jake; he was an introvert, possessing quiet intelligence and determination. So far as she knew, he had made no friends in a year of space travel, nor did he have any family that he'd referred to. He had politely declined friendly openings and invitations from various members of the crew. He worked, exercised and ate mechanically and precisely, and spent the rest of his time in his quarters, presumably working on his precious computers. When asked personal questions, he would simply fix the questioner with a flat stare and say nothing.

Two hours later, after many fruitless attempts to scan or communicate with the strange, unidentified object, it was brought on board into an ancillary landing bay. The room was lined with four nervous crewmembers wielding a disparate collection of directed energy weapons, decked out in futuristic space suits. Three technicians were examining the upright monolith with hand-held scanners, while the Captain and half-a-dozen others watched the proceedings from an overhead gantry, protected from the vacuum with triple-layered reinforced glass panels.

'Anything yet?' the Captain queried over the radio. 'Still nut'in, boss.' Came the heavily accented reply. 'Doesn't seem dangerous.' Came another voice. 'Very well. We'll be reentering hyperspace momentarily. We can examine this… Thing, on the way to Tau Conguisse.'

Ten minutes later, the twelve kilometre-long freighter began to gently accelerate, its fusion generators coasting up to high power. Half an hour after that, it vanished from normal space-time in a flare of blue plasma, sending a slight ripple through the space it had previously occupied.

Over the next two hours, Captain Tosha's technicians and engineers continued to examine the monolith. Superluminal particle beam scans failed to penetrate it, even when ramped up to the highest available intensity. Attempts to remove a sample of the shell for chemical analysis failed, and when numerous chemical tests were applied directly to the monolith, they were all inconclusive. Finally, the chief engineer suggested that they might attempt to ionize a small section of the outer shell.

A small laser emitter was set up, and within a few minutes, the very baffling, and slightly alarming results came back; the substance not only refused to ionize when subjected to extremely high-energy laser beams, but it gave off no infra-red radiation, whatsoever. In fact, it seemed to soak up several wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation completely, while completely or partially reflecting others.

Hours later, the mad rush to examine the mysterious artefact started to subside, and that was when something very strange happened; a section of the monolith lit up, suddenly; the outline of a complex, overlapping series of lines and geometric shapes ringed around the upper foot or so of the monolith's surface faded into existence, made of what seemed to be radiant white light.

The crew assigned to guarding the monolith reacted fast; plasma rifles snapped up to shoulders, and safety-switches were toggled. For a few seconds, nothing happened. Then suddenly, a blur of movement, and bulky, seven-foot tall figures in jet-black powered armour were swarming out of the monolith. The four on-duty guards never stood a chance; particle beams impaled them, sending gouts of boiling blood and atmosphere spraying into the room. In total, eighteen figures rushed into the control room in the first wave, while a single, slightly taller figure followed them from the monolith, dressed in bulkier, stronger-looking armour, wielding a strange, two-pronged heavy rifle with thick, fat cables trailing from the weapon to a large fusion-backpack that he wore.

All of this was witnessed on the bridge; the Captain leapt to her feet, and immediately ordered that plasma rifles be handed out, and that her crew were to fall back to defensible positions. She had turned to the young, excitable-looking humanoid rodent-like creature that sat at the security console, and had just started giving another order when Jake rose smoothly from his station, and drew a small device from his sleeve.

He brandished it like a wand, and pointed it at her. There was a tiny flare of red light, and Captain Tosha's head exploded like a watermelon, spattering the small, disparate bridge crew with crimson gore. The rodent-like security officer went down next; his blood was bright orange, which fountained out of a smoking hole in his chest. The single guard, wielding a plasma rifle, standing next to the door, had just started to raise his weapon when he was decapitated with an indistinct streak of red light, sending a geyser of very dark blue blood into the air.

The pilot was next; she tried to dive behind her console, and the particle projector caught her in the abdomen, shredding her stomach. Jake calmly dispatched her by breaking her neck. He walked swiftly to the security console, and inserted the back end of his particle projector into a slot. He smiled slightly as the program he had written took effect; in under a minute, the inhabited sections of the ship were decompressed, all except for the bridge.

This didn't bother the Kal troops in their pressurized armour; they made sure any Humans or aliens on board were really dead, then set about re-airing the vessel, aided by Jake. The bodies were gathered in the room with the monolith, and the leader of the Kal troops, along with Jake, knelt in front of the strange, grey monolith. Jake looked different now; he was flecked with dried blood from assassinating the bridge crew, and his eyes had changed; they burned an insane orange, with slits for pupils. His posture was different too; more fluid, but vaguely unnatural.

The two of them knelt in front of the monolith for several uneventful minutes. Just as Jake was beginning to wonder if there was a problem, the surface of the monolith rippled, just slightly, and a peculiar, vaguely pepperpot-shaped creature glided out. It was made of a dull gold metal, standing roughly as tall as a standard Human, though it was much broader and deeper. It had only two crude appendages, and mounted on the dome that topped it was a metal eyestalk, with a glowing blue aperture that stared lifelessly ahead.

'STATUS!' It shrieked, its voice metallic and synthesized, translated from the thoughts of the creature inside. 'My lord, the vessel is ours. It was not damaged. No allied casualties.' Jake spoke, the creature remained silent. The creature turned its eyestalk on him, and it seemed to consider him.

'YOU PLANNED THIS?' 'Yes my lords. I received your message, and recognized this as your vehicle. I had planned the destruction of this crew, in case you…' 'YOU WERE NOT ASSIGNED TO DESTROY THIS VESSEL.' 'Yes my lord. I felt… I felt it was better to be… Prepared, in case my masters had need of this crude conveyance.' The creature was silent for a few moments, and then the gold metal dome, which was presumably its head or a head analogue, rotated and turned, its eyestalk fixing on the monolith.

It stared at the monolith for a few moments, as though someone was talking to it, though there was not audible reply. Then it turned back towards the two kneeling figures. 'WE HAVE NEED OF THIS VESSEL. DROP OUT OF HYPERSPACE AND SET A COURSE FOR THE ASTEROID BASE KNOWN AS RO'TYRONNE. MAXIMUM SUSTAINABLE SPEED.'

Jake scurried back to the bridge while the Dalek spoke with the Kal Sub-Controller. 'WE HAVE SUSTAINED EXTREME DAMAGE. WE WILL NEED YOUR TROOPS TO TRANSPORT THE FOLLOWING SUPPLIES TO OUR VESSEL.' The Kal troops were quickly organized into parties that scoured the vessel for valuable supplies. An additional thirty-six Kal, in squads of six, exited the monolith, securing strategic points within the vessel.

The vessel dropped out of hyperspace a few minutes later, and over the next hour-and-a-half, came to a gradual halt, computed its relative position, and then started in another direction, heading for a remote asteroid trading post.

On-board the Dalek's TARDIS, their situation was grave indeed. Cables trailing from rent bulkheads and the support framework that reinforced the main control room was partially collapsed. The massive glass column that ran from the tangle of machinery in the centre of the room was cracked, with a football-sized hole in it. Two Kal, under the supervision of a Dalek, were carefully hammering a sheet of soft lead to cover the breach.

The ground was covered with small chunks of scorched metal and shards of glass; any Daleks in the room levitated a few centimetres above the ground to avoid the debris. The room didn't have a central console per se, but rather banks of consoles and equipment lined the walls. Most were inoperative, but two or three were still partially functional, and were being tended to by Kal technicians. Three Daleks glided around the room, screeching orders at subordinates and rotating importantly, their internal propulsion systems buzzing and whirring.

One of the Daleks had been destroyed when a large and heavy beam had fallen on it; it sat, sad and forlorn, its dome buckled slightly, the grid of sensor panels directly underneath twisted and rent, green blood trickling gently from within. On the wall opposite the door to the control room was a large construct, evidently a Dalek; it was massive and squat, with hugely-thick armour and a single camera mounted on an eyestalk watching the emergency repair work happening below it with mechanical precision.

'Sir?' One of the Kal had approached the massive Dalek. The Dalek's eyestalk whizzed down, and focussed unblinkingly and intently upon the creature below it. 'BEGIN YOUR REPORT.' The Dalek's voice was so deep it could be felt vibrating the internal organs. 'Only one cloning factory is still salvageable. We could have it partially functional in five days if we use parts from the non-functional factories.' 'HOW LONG BEFORE WE CAN TRAVEL THROUGH THE TIME VORTEX?' There was a moment's hesitation.

'At the present rate of repairs, we could have limited time-travel capabilities within three years. However, with the cargo from the freighter, we might be able to time-travel in a limited fashion inside two months.' 'VERY WELL. WHAT OF THE DEFENCE SYSTEMS?' 'Defensive shielding is beyond our capabilities to repair, as are the cloaking systems and dimensional shifting functions. We can have ten per cent of the internal energy shielding barriers online within a week.'

There was a long silence, and then, 'BEGIN REPAIRS TO THE CLONING FACTORY. BEGIN PRODUCTING REPLACEMENT KAL TROOPS AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.' 'But what of bio-matter, my lord? Most of our stocks are contaminated, or destroyed. Where shall we get the basic constituents to manufacture our troops?' 'USE THE BODIES OF THE CREW FROM THE FREIGHTER.' 'Very well, my lord.'

The vessel re-entered hyperspace with a flash of blue light as the Daleks and Kal scuttled, scurried and glided around the ship, readying plans and weapons, reorganizing and re-constituting. It would take three days to reach Ro'Tyronne, and the Daleks knew that they would have to be prepared for the slaughter…


	4. Sand and Spines

Disclaimer: Doctor Who doesn't belong to me, nor do any of the concepts, technologies, species or characters from the series.

**The Lost TARDIS**

**By Type 22 TARDIS**

**Sand and Spines:**

Derrick had found a spot in the futuristic buggy to sit, and was now becoming aware of the searing pain in his right thigh. 'I'm hit!' He said, his voice sounding strange to his own ears. He reached out, and touched the spike that was protruding from his leg. It was slightly thicker than a porcupine's quill, and about as long. The end that was poking out was sticky and rubbery. The wound didn't seem to be bleeding very much, though it was hurting a lot. Derrick wasn't accustomed to pain or injury; his hissed and grimaced.

One of the humanoids next to him said, 'Roll over; I'll remove it.' The voice sounded female, though Derrick didn't know if this was necessarily accurate; would aliens even have genders? Derrick did so, bouncing and lurching as the space buggy did so. 'Who are you?' Derrick asked as the creature next to him removed what looked like a tube of medication from a belt pocket. Then the humanoid reached up, and removed its mask, or helmet, and threw it aside, and Derrick relaxed somewhat.

The humanoid was a Human; she had medium-length, slightly lanky brown hair, a lean, practical sort of face and curiously yellow eyes. She drew a knife, and he tensed, but she only used it to cut a slot into the back of his trousers. She reached in, and in one practiced motion, she removed the spine. Derrick cried out momentarily, before biting his lip; that had _hurt_. She quickly applied some medicine from the tube, and then indicated that Derrick could sit.

He was doubtful for a moment, but then did, and noticed that the pain had vanished almost immediately. 'In answer to your question, I am Terissae.' Their voices were different now; it seemed as though they _were_ speaking English, though the movements of their mouths didn't match the sounds they were making. 'And you are?' She asked, and he said, 'I'm Derrick.' She didn't seem confused by the statement, and she had understood his earlier query, so he assumed that his ability to understand her was two-way.

'What the hell is that thing?' He said, pointing at the blood-tipped sting she was holding. 'This is a fire-spine. They do not cause great injury, but they cause great pain, especially if not removed. This heals.' She held up the tube that she had applied, and he realised that it had seen heavy use; it was mostly gone, the metal or plastic tube rolled almost completely up. There was an illustration or writing on it, but that was almost gone, rubbed off by the movements of many years.

'So, what were those things? Where am I? Why are you… You…' Derrick felt as if he'd panic for a moment, but he breathed deeply, and said, 'What were those things chasing us?' Terissae seemed baffled by the question. 'They are the Jundaphette. Do you not know them?' 'No. I'm… I'm from…' He stopped. His mind was racing. He was on another planet, one which orbited three stars. These people were Humans, but didn't that mean that this was the future? Or maybe Humans were really aliens, that had colonized Earth at some point. There were too many thoughts rushing through his head for him to form coherent words; he sat, and looked around the vehicle, trying to glean some information from its construction.

It was large; inside was about the size of the inside of a luxurious four-wheel drive, and it had a partition between the front and back seats. There was a driver, another figure in the passenger's seat, Terissae sitting next to him, and another person on the rear of the vehicle, where there was mounted that strange, large-barrelled weapon.

The inside was undoubtedly very high-tech; transparent readouts and numbers swirled efficiently by on the windscreen, their soft blue light contrasting sharply with the harsh white light from outside. He realised that all of the windows were tinted somewhat; the inside was darker, and was quite cool and comfortable.

'So where are you from?' Terissae asked, and there was a sudden noise; Derrick started, but it was just the partition leading the front of the vehicle being lowered. A man with a hard, tanned face looked in from the passenger's seat, listening to the proceedings. Derrick noted he also had bright yellow eyes, though otherwise seemed human. 'This is Derrick. Derrick, this is James. So, Derrick, you were saying where you are from.' 'I'm… I'm from Earth.' Derrick said stupidly, and he was surprised to see shock in Terissae's face. 'You mean you're here to rescue us?' Came the voice from the man in the passenger's seat, and Derrick hesitated. 'I don't know, I… I was on Earth, and then I was in a dark room, and then… I was here.'

Terissae frowned. 'Did you come here on purpose?' She asked, and Derrick shook his head. 'No. I… I don't even really know where _here_ is.' 'This is Ut'aee'Vareeia II.' Derrick looked blankly at her. 'I don't know where that is.' Terissae hesitated, evidently thinking. 'Do you have shelter? Are there others that might need rescuing?' Derrick considered telling her about the monolith that connected to the massive, dark room, but after considering it, he had a nagging feeling that this was something best kept secret, not told to everyone that he met.

'No. I think I'm the only one here. At least, I didn't see anyone else; you're the first people I've met.' Terissae nodded. 'Then we shall take you to our city, and you can tell everyone there what you know, after you have had something to eat. For now, drink.' She reached into her belt pockets again, and pulled a small hip-flask out. She proffered it to Derrick, who said, 'Thanks,' and unscrewed the lid. The metal was cool from the air-conditioned air of the futuristic vehicle, and seemed to just be pure water, not spirits or some bizarre alien beverage.

He had several mouthfuls, and within seconds, he felt his headache ebbing and his throat stopped burning. They lurched along for another few minutes, and Derrick became aware that he had rather a large hole just below his right buttock; Terissae hadn't said anything, and hadn't signalled to him that this might be unacceptable, but he still felt awkward. He wondered if he should ask her if they had a spare pair of trousers or something.

It was fairly silent for a few minutes, before the driver said, 'We're back.' Derrick stood up slightly in his seat, and stared out the front window, eager to see this city. City meant civilization, safety, and information. He expected buildings and roads, glass and concrete, or at least some form of city that he could recognize. Instead, he blinked, unsure of what it was he was supposed to be seeing.

What he _could_ see was a large mass of rock, jutting out of the ground, about five-hundred metres up ahead. Around it was a vast, circular pit or canyon that fell out of sight. Leading to it was a single stone bridge, about six metres wide, braced with what seemed to be age-worn, tarnished metal, and made flat by the addition of concrete sections. The bridge seemed to terminate about fifty meters down from the top of the rocky section, and at the end of it was an arched entrance leading into darkness.

Their vehicle slowed, and they began to cross the bridge. Derrick could see what was presumably a watchtower with a battered metal door about two-thirds of the way down the bridge, with a small building haphazardly attached to the tower, improvised metal braces welded onto the well-crafted main ones.

As they approached what was presumably a checkpoint, Derrick saw that there was another robe-swathed figure in the tower. Their buggy slowed, and stopped in front of the checkpoint. There were a few moments of silence, and then a voice crackled into life over the radio, and Derrick saw the person in the watchtower was holding what looked like a walkie-talkie up to its head.

'_Evening Junnta. Anything interesting happen on your foray? Find out what that energy signature was?' _The driver answered, speaking into the mass of displays and dials that took the spot that a normal car's radio would normally occupy. 'No Kev, but we did find… Someone out near the Salt Plains.' There was silence for a few moments, and then, _'Please repeat. You found a _person _near the Salt Plains?' _'Affirmative. He claims to be from Earth.'

There was another long silence, and then, _'Very well then. Enter, and be welcome.'_ The dented metal door clumsily grated open, and the four-wheel drive/space buggy smoothly accelerated forwards. They passed through the checkpoint, and James waved to the guard from the passenger's seat. They proceeded forwards, and moved steadily towards the arched stone entrance that led into the darkness.


	5. The Fall of the Eighth

Disclaimer: Doctor Who doesn't belong to me, nor do any of the concepts, technologies, species or characters from the series.

**The Lost TARDIS**

**By Type 22 TARDIS**

**The Fall of the Eighth:**

The Doctor wrestled with the controls of his TARDIS as the floor shook and the lights flickered. Alarms blared, whistled and shrieked, and the deep peal of a gong resonated through the room at regular intervals. The Cloister Bell, a signal that the TARDIS was in imminent danger of being destroyed.

The ship suddenly lurched, and the Doctor was thrown onto the hard, wooden decking. The lights finally went out, and there was an ominous rumbling sound. Flames rained down from somewhere above, and the Doctor covered his face as chunks of metal, wood, plastic conduits and fried circuitry rained down upon him. He deflected most it with his arms, and out of the corner of his eyes his saw motes of golden light wafting from the cuts and bruises as they rapidly healed-courtesy of him regenerating only moments prior.

He wrenched himself back towards the central console, and started to pull levers and activate emergency systems. His ship shook alarmingly again, and smoke began to furl out of the navigational systems in the console. He gritted his teeth, and, holding tightly to railings and support beams, staggered towards the device that sat squatly in front of the TARDIS' main doors.

By his perception of time, a few minutes ago, he had fired the device known as the Moment into the centre of the Gallifrey star system. The Moment had been conceived as the ultimate endgame device-when fired, it could target a city, a building, a vehicle, a species… Or an entire solar system.

The Doctor had been fighting in the Time War for well over a century-the Daleks and Timelords had been carefully sparring against each other, each hoarding technology, time-travel devices, secrets and warships, though the Daleks had the advantage of not being bound to a moral or ethical code; they could do anything they liked to gain an advantage; the Timelords could not. At least, not at first.

Finally, however, open warfare had occurred; a Dalek fleet engaged a Timelord outpost, far from Gallifrey. The Dalek fleet had been annihilated by a single, latest-generation war-TARDIS, armed to the teeth with state-of-the-art weaponry. That first Dalek fleet had contained eighty-three warships, four-hundred ninety-two smaller combat vessels and forty-five assorted support ships and troop carriers. Every single vessel had been destroyed, and the Timelords had sustained no casualties.

Then, only half-an-hour later, the second wave of Dalek ships had arrived; seven-hundred fifty-one warships, twenty-six-thousand one-hundred and thirty-two smaller combat vessels and some two-hundred and eighty support vessels and invasion craft. The Timelord's TARDIS had been forced to retreat after destroying over sixty per cent of the enemy vessels. The outpost was bombarded, to no effect, and its own surface-to-orbit weaponry had easily dispatched the rest of the Dalek fleet. In total, the Daleks sent three more fleets to that star system, each one larger than the last.

Finally, the outpost had fallen; every Timelord TARDIS, outpost and any of their developed star-systems existed outside of what most beings would call 'normal space-time'-it was impossible to time-travel inside these places, for instance, and if you went into a time period before their space-time had been isolated, and changed something, you would either find that your changes had no effect on the present whatsoever, and that time simply compensated for your alterations, or you would find it impossible to institute a change.

The way this was maintained was a TARDIS-heart, bound into the centre of the outpost, star system or TARDIS. On the outpost, this TARDIS heart had been destroyed, and the space-time lock had failed. The Daleks then had one of their ships travel into the distant past and place an antimatter explosive inside the planet, set to detonate in the present.

The Daleks proceeded in this manner, destroying the few outposts the Timelords had bothered to build, and finally, they arrived at Gallifrey's star system. The Timelords had prepared by now, and the war raged for decades. Thousands upon thousands of ships were destroyed each day-in some places, planets were coated with torn metal plating and semi-functional chunks of starships.

One by one, the Timelord's outposts and colonies were wiped out, the Daleks fuelled by what was later discovered to be thousands of alien empires and federations, all enslaved, forced to build uncountable warships for the Daleks. The Timelords almost literally drowned in Dalek warships; by the time of Gallifrey's destruction, a crust of smashed metal, half a kilometre thick in some places, covered over half the planet.

The Timelords won victory after victory, and used dozens and dozens of secret weapons and brilliant plans to hold out for nearly fifty years. The Timelords even pushed the Daleks back at one point, and ravaged their enemy's star systems and factory planets. But the Daleks that were still massed around Gallifrey survived, and continued their assault.

Finally, the last Daleks battled desperately against the last intact citadel of the Timelords, and the Timelords, realizing what was about to happen, initiated the Final Sanction. If completed, it would result in a rupture in the Time Vortex that would rip all of space-time apart, and destroy the entire universe. Even the altered space-time wouldn't protect them against that.

The Doctor had realised that the Timelords were insane-the strain of so much war for so long, staggered regenerations, the deaths of so many friends and family had unhinged enough of the governing body to make the entire civilization unstable and self-destructive. So he had made a plan of his own. In an earlier misadventure, he had been involved with salvaging an ancient Timelord weapon, known as the Moment.

His vision became blurry and his eyes hot as he thought about what he'd done. He staggered forwards, and drew his sonic screwdriver. The Moment was still firing; it had never been intended to survive a single use. Courtesy of his TARDIS' enhanced shielding, the effects were confined to his own ship, as opposed to cutting a swathe of non-being through the universe, though that was only a small comfort to him at the moment.

He finally righted himself, and pointed the sonic screwdriver squarely at the device. The sonic device whirred and buzzed, under strong telepathic commands from him to deactivate or disarm the device. It sent back a strong impression of confusion-there was nothing that it could deactivate, and no vital components it could disconnect or damage.

The Doctor snarled, and fell back towards the central console. He couldn't reach the architectural reconfiguration controls; he pointed his screwdriver into the central console, and squeezed the handle, instructing his TARDIS to replace the Moment with a chunk of inert block-matter.

The damaged TARDIS struggled to comply-golden light flared around the Moment, and as the TARDIS selected a material and texture, there was another deep rumble. Sparks shot out of the side of the control console as something underneath it exploded, and the structure of the TARDIS shrieked in protest. The architectural reconfiguration controls chose that moment to fry out, and the Doctor watched in horror as the golden motes of light suddenly, and alarmingly, changed shape.

The Moment vanished, disintegrating into nothing, as did a large chunk of the front doors and a huge chunk of the walls to the left of it. Flames roared out from severed conduits and pipes, and sparks rained down. The Doctor could see grey, cloudy skies wheeling through the door, and heaved himself over to a still-functional monitor.

'Earth! Where else?' He yelled to the control room, and was startled by the sound of his own voice-it was different, with a heavy Northern accent. But he didn't get long to consider any of this; a support beam, high above his head, suddenly gave way. It crashed into the shell of metal struts that surrounded the main control room and held the time rotor in place.

There was an almighty crash, but the cage of metal held. The Doctor cursed, and flipped more levers, to no effect. Suddenly, there was an almighty impact, far, far worse than any of the previous ones. He was thrown off his feet, and suddenly, pain blossomed in his lower back.

He blacked out for a moment, and when he woke, he immediately noticed several things; the TARDIS had stopped shaking and shuddering, and now sat, inert and dead on a thirty degree angle. And he had been impaled through the left kidney on a sharp piece of metal. Gasping with pain, moving under the direction of reflexes and instinct only, he pulled himself off the spike, watching it retract into his body, and the wet _snick_ it made as it left him.

He rolled over onto the metal deck, lying on his belly, and he gasped with relief as he saw motes of heatless golden flames licking at his belly. Within seconds, the pain had vanished. 'Well, that's one good thing about regeneration.' He said to himself, and he stood and flexed, feeling the way his body moved. It was skinnier and more mobile than his previous one. That, and it was much younger. This one was only about forty years old.

He then examined the room around him. The main door had been mostly destroyed, but before his eyes, was regrowing, the blackened, charred wood becoming a deep, rich blue. A great tear, three metres by one metre, had been burned through the wall next the main door, and he could see the looming, ominous shapes of important-looking machines, now charred and useless. Sparks sputtered occasionally from above, or else from charred and badly-damaged machinery that belched from torn sections of the TARDIS, and flames guttered quietly on the central console.

With difficulty, he staggered over to the main control console, and used his jacket to smother the flames. Most of the readouts and displays were dark, but a few sputtered feebly on as he approached. The Cloister Bell had stopped, so at least he was out of immediate danger. He withdrew his sonic screwdriver, and pointed it at the semi-destroyed machinery. Before he could begin to direct the repair efforts, however, another alarm started up, and without warning, water began to cascade down from somewhere in the darkness above him.

He swore, and grabbing his jacket, he staggered over to the partially-regenerated door. The Doctor threw the door open, and jumped out of the TARDIS. His angle of orientation changed suddenly as the gravity shifted, and behind him, he heard new alarms start up, as well as the dangerous crackle of electricity and the splashing of water. He turned around, his feet sinking slightly into sand.

The TARDIS was embedded deeply into the sand of a grey, gloomy-looking beach, with tall, imposing-looking cliffs. A chunk had been torn out of the lip of one of them; it looked as though the TARDIS had collided with it. The ship itself looked like a wreck; the police box façade was no longer particularly convincing; the front door was still burned and charred, with holes leading into the main control room.

The light at the top of the box had been smashed, and was gently flaming with blue time-fire. Inside, a steady stream of water streamed down from the mysterious darkness that clung to the ceiling of the main control room, and splashed all over the floor, pouring into breaches and tears, soaking the main control console. Smoke and sparks fizzed wildly in all directions. The Doctor hesitated, assessing the amount of damage.

It would be too much for the TARDIS to repair under normal circumstances; as if on cue, the Doctor felt a telepathic signal from the TARDIS, and the inside seemed to dissolve into weightless golden flames.

The police box seemed to ripple with golden light, and he felt a part of him fall away. The TARDIS' manifestation glowed momentarily, and then became perfect and undamaged once more. The door clicked twice, indicating it had been deadlocked to prevent entry while the TARDIS was repairing itself.

He slumped onto the sand, and covered his face with his hands. And he remembered. He'd found the entirety of the Daleks and Timelords massed around Gallifrey. Neither was going to forego the protective field that prevented time-travel. He retrieved the Moment, connected it to his ship, and locked onto the Gallifrey star system. He'd activated an FTL scrambler that was built into the Moment, and then he'd started the charging sequence. A few seconds later, he had fired. _'I'm sorry.'_ Was all he could say. There wasn't anything else to say. He'd fully expected to die; he hadn't predicted that his TARDIS wouldn't fold after it was hit with the initial shockwave.

But he had, and his survival instincts had kicked in; he had survived. _Because I'm a coward. A coward, a manipulator and a cheat._ He thought. But he pushed those thoughts down, or at least tried to. Now that the danger of the situation was no longer as pressing, he could feel anguish and horror at what he had done crashing over him. He had destroyed the Timelords. He had killed them all.

He had destroyed the race who had built time, itself. His misery and depression glued him to that spot for what seemed like a moment, but was probably many hours. He became cold, and the damp from the coarse, grey sand soaked through his trousers. The sky lightened somewhat as the sun reached its zenith, somewhere far beyond the sheet of flat, grey cloud, and then began to darken as the sun, defeated, began its retreat.

It started to rain. Lightly at first, and then more heavily, the drops first damping his shoulders, then wetting them, then soaking his shirt and his hair. He looked down at himself, and realised he was still wearing his old clothes. His _clothes._ He thought aggressively. The clothes of the eighth Doctor. His previous incarnation.

Finally, he got to his feet, and staggered off along the beach, the key to his ailing TARDIS cold in his shirt pocket. 'I killed them.' He muttered to himself . He was no longer crying, but his face was completely dead and pale, a parody of a living one. 'They're all dead because of me.'

He stood up, and stumbled along the beach, the world inside infinitely darker and colder than the one outside.


End file.
